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The Cold War

Order these Cold War events by the year they happened. You place all 45 cards on one timeline, one at a time. You start with three lives, and ten right in a row wins a lost one back.

The Cold War
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Order these Cold War events by the year they happened. Drag or tap it onto the line
Cold War
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Cold War
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45
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal

How to play the Cold War timeline game

The cards are moments from the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies: crises, summits, treaties, uprisings, spy dramas and the space race. Each names the event, with the place printed underneath, and you order them by the year it happened. One event sits on the line with its year showing. Drop each new card into a gap. When you're right the year is revealed; when you're wrong it still goes to its real place, and one of your three lives is gone.

All of these fit inside a span of under fifty years, so the gaps are tight and several cards can share a year. Think in terms of who was in charge in Washington and Moscow, and which crisis led to which. Nuclear tests and arms treaties follow a rough pattern of tension and thaw. The final years pile up fast, as one change in Eastern Europe tumbled into the next.

Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.

What's in the deck

Here are 28 of the 45 cards you might be dealt, with 17 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.

  • Truman Doctrine Washington, D.C.
  • Berlin Airlift West Berlin
  • First Soviet atomic bomb test Kazakh SSR
  • Korean War begins Korean Peninsula
  • Death of Stalin Moscow
  • Iranian coup d'etat Tehran
  • Army-McCarthy hearings Washington, D.C.
  • Hungarian Revolution Budapest
  • Sputnik launched Soviet Union
  • U-2 spy plane shot down Soviet Union
  • Berlin Wall built Berlin
  • Cuban Missile Crisis Cuba
  • Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Moscow
  • Gulf of Tonkin incident Vietnam
  • Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia
  • Nixon visits China Beijing
  • SALT I signed Moscow
  • Fall of Saigon South Vietnam
  • Helsinki Accords Helsinki
  • Moscow Olympics boycott Moscow
  • Martial law in Poland Poland
  • Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shot down Near Sakhalin
  • Los Angeles Olympics boycott Los Angeles
  • Gorbachev takes power Moscow
  • INF Treaty signed Washington, D.C.
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall Berlin
  • Velvet Revolution Prague
  • August Coup attempt Moscow

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